House Speaker Nancy Pelosi claimed Thursday in a dramatic press conference that Attorney General Bill Barr committed a crime in sworn testimony last month, ratcheting up the latest war of words to paralyze Washington in the Trump era.

‘He lied to Congress. He lied to Congress. If anybody else did that, it would be considered a crime,’ Pelosi told reporters. ‘Nobody is above the law. Not the President of the United States and not the attorney general.’

Barr testified April 9 in a House hearing that ‘no, I don’t’ know why some members of special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team were frustrated by the nature of what he released to Congress on March 24.

With this week’s revelation of a March 27 letter in which Mueller told Barr he was displeased with how little material had been made public, that statement appears to have given Democrats a new weapon. Barr, however, plans to stick to his guns, according to a Justice Department official.

House speaker Nancy Pelosi ratcheted up Washington’s partisan acrimony on Thursday, claiming Attorney General Bill Barr committed a crime in testimony before Congress

Barr told a House panel in April that he didn’t know why some members of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team were frustrated by how little information he had released to lawmakers; he said no, despite getting a letter weeks earlier with grips from Mueller himself

During a House Appropriations Committee, Florida Democratic Rep. asked: ‘Reports have emerged recently, general, that members of the Special Counsel’s team are frustrated at some level with the limited information included in your March 24th letter, that it does not adequately or accurately necessarily portray the report’s findings. Do you know what they’re referencing with that?”

Barr said he didn’t. He added: ‘I suspect that they probably wanted more put out, but in my view, I was not interested in putting out summaries or trying to summarize.’

A DOJ official predicted on Thursday that Barr will stand by his claim that Crist’s question was poorly worded since it asked about Mueller’s team of lawyers and not the special counsel himself.

‘Crist asked it wrong. AG Barr did what good witnesses do: he didn’t answer a question that wasn’t asked,’ the official told DailyMail.com.

‘When a prosecutor asks you if you know what time it is, you don’t tell him it’s 12:30. If you know, the answer is yes. You don’t volunteer anything. We all learn that in law school.’

Officially, a Justice Department spokesperson issued a terse statement: ‘Speaker Pelosi’s baseless attack on the Attorney General is reckless, irresponsible and false.’

The March 27 letter from Mueller to Barr came three days after Barr released his four-page top-line results to a bipartisan quartet of congressional leaders from both judiciary committees.

Florida Democratic Rep. Charlie Crist asked the question during an April 9 hearing; he said Wednesday that Barr should resign, joining a growing chorus of Democrats looking to make hay from a potential misstep by President Donald Trump’s newest cabinet member

He wrote that Barr’s limited disclosures had resulted in ‘public confusion about critical aspects of the results of our investigation. This threatens to undermine a central purpose for which the Department appointed the Special Counsel: to assure full public confidence in the outcome of the investigation.’

Barr said Wednesday that he decided against releasing the Mueller report ‘piecemeal,’ describing the report as ‘my baby’ at the point it hit his desk.

He also described the letter as ‘a bit snitty,’ and suggested someone on Mueller’s staff wrote it.

Pelosi’s esclation came hours after House Judiciary Committee Democrats briefly gaveled in a hearing where Barr had expected to testify for a second day in a row, after sitting for an extended Senate grilling on Wednesday.

Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler lectured the Trump administration, facing an empty chair, while other Democrats ate KFC and displayed a plastic chicken to frame Barr as a coward.

Tennessee Democratic Rep. Steve Cohen brought the bucket of Original Recipe, eating a piece at 9:00 in the morning while reporters gawked and camera shutters clicked. The food ended its brief cameo on the witness table, along with a ceramic chicken, next to what would have been Barr’s name placard.

Nadler opted to convene the hearing rather than waste a made-for-TV tableau after Barr refused to show up, with the Justice Department citing Nadler’s demand that staff attorneys should be able to question him in addition to elected lawmakers.

‘Given the Attorney General’s lack of candor before other congressional committees,’ Nadler said in an opening statement, referring to Barr’s hours-long grilling Wednesday on the Senate side ofthe Capitol, ‘I believe my colleagues and I were right to insist on the extended questioning.’

Ranking Republican Rep. Doug Collins of Georgia hit the roof, saying Democrats were treating Barr as a proxy for Trump because they ‘can’t’ or ‘don’t want’ to publicly impeach him.

Democrats in the House Judiciary Committee held an abbriviated hearing on Thursday with a plastic chicken standing in for Attorney General Bill Barr, who refused to attend because the chairman demanded he submit himself to questions from staff lawyers in addition to lawmakers

House Judiciary Committee Chair Jerrold Nadler slammed Barr for refusing to appear, and threatened the Justice Department with action for refusing to turn over an unredacted copy of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russia election interference

Barr, who spent hours testifying in a Senate hearing on Wednesday and was seen leaving his house Thursday, can’t release an unredacted copy of the report to anyone, including Congress, because federal law requires him to protect material related to grand juries; all the other redactions have been uncovered in a copy made available to congressional leaders from both parties

‘The stunt and the circus continues over here,’ he boomed.

‘They wanted to have a staff member ask questions?’ Collins asked. ‘If that staff member wants to ask questions so desperately, run for Congress! Put a pin on. Find a committee.’

Nadler quickly gaveled the hearing to a close, ignoring other Republicans’ demands for parliamentary questions about the event’s format and whether they would have a chance to speak.

Pelosi wouldn’t speculate on Thursday about what Nadler might do next.

‘The committee will act upon how it will proceed,’ she said in a cryptic forecast.

‘How sad it is for us to see the top law enforcement officer in our country misrepresenting, withholding the truth from the Congress of the United States,’ she said.

Crist said late Weddnesday that Barr was parsing words and should have understood the spirit of the question he asked on April 9.

‘He not only misled the House of Representatives but also the United States Senate. When you’re doing that then you’re lying to the American people and if the chief legal officer of the United States is willing to do that, that erodes confidence in our institutions. That’s just unacceptable,’ he said.

Spygate (conspiracy theory by Donald Trump)

It has been requested that the title of this article be changed. Please see the relevant discussion on the discussion page. The page should not be moved unless the discussion is closed; summarizing the consensus achieved in support of the move.

On June 5, 2018, Trump further alleged that a counterintelligence operation into the Trump campaign had been running since December 2015.[8] The House Intelligence Committee, then in Republican control, concluded in an April 2018 report that the FBI counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign began in late July 2016, while the February 2018 Nunes memo written by Republican aides reached the same conclusion, as did the February 2018 rebuttal memo by committee Democrats.[9][10][11]

High-ranking politicians on both sides of the aisle, as well as Fox News personalities, have dismissed Trump’s allegations as lacking evidence and maintained that the FBI did nothing improper. Trump’s claims have been shown to be false.[5][12][13]

Contents

Background

Trump has been involved in the promotion of a number of conspiracy theories which are lacking in evidence. These have included promoting Barack Obama citizenship conspiracy theories from 2011, claiming in 2016 that Ted Cruz‘s father was involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and claiming that he would have won the popular vote in the 2016 election if not for “millions” of illegal voters. Trump also alleged in 2017 that his Trump Tower offices had been wiretapped, which his Justice Department has debunked.[14]Max Boot, writing for The Washington Post, described Spygate as the latest example in a “nonstop” series of Trump’s “nonsensical” allegations of a “Deep State” conspiracy against him, and that an earlier conspiracy theory Trump had advocated in January 2018 was that texts between FBI employees Peter Strzok and Lisa Page were tantamount to “treason”, but the Wall Street Journal reviewed them and concluded they “show no evidence of a conspiracy against” Trump.[15]

In early February 2018, the Nunes memo — written by aides of Republican Devin Nunes, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee — confirmed that a tip about George Papadopoulos “triggered the opening of” the original FBI counterintelligence investigation into links between the Trump campaign and Russia in late July 2016.[16] Later that month, a rebuttal memo by committee Democrats stated that “the FBI initiated its counterintelligence investigation on July 31, 2016”.[11][17]

In April 2018, the House Intelligence Committee, then in Republican control, released a final report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, which stated that the House Intelligence Committee found that “in late July 2016, the FBI opened an enterprise CI [counterintelligence] investigation into the Trump campaign following the receipt of derogatory information about foreign policy advisor George Papadopoulos”.[9][10][18] In March 2019, Nunes, the then-ranking member of the committee, asserted that it was “for certain” false that the FBI investigation began in late July 2016 as his earlier report had found, but media reports offered no further evidence or explanation from Nunes on this claim.[9][19][20]

On May 16, 2018, The New York Times reported the existence of a 2016 FBI investigation named Crossfire Hurricane tasked with investigating whether individuals within the Trump campaign had inappropriate or illegal links to Russian efforts to interfere with the election. Four individuals — Michael T. Flynn, Paul Manafort, Carter Page and George Papadopoulos — were initially investigated because of such ties.[21] During the investigation, the FBI “obtained phone records and other documents using national security letters, a secret type of subpoena”. The Times also reported that FBI agents, believing that Trump would lose the election, and cognizant of Trump’s claims that the election was rigged against him, took extreme care and caution to keep the investigation secret as they feared that Trump would blame his defeat on the revelation of the investigation.[21]

Stefan Halper spoke to Trump campaign advisers, but there is no evidence that Halper had actually joined Trump’s campaign.

Although an FBI informant, Stefan Halper, spoke separately to three Trump campaign advisers – Carter Page, Sam Clovis and George Papadopoulos – in 2016 in an effort to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections, there is no evidence that Halper had actually joined Trump’s campaign. Page said that he “had extensive discussions” with Halper on “a bunch of different foreign-policy-related topics”, ending in September 2017.[22] A former federal law enforcement official told The New York Times that their initial encounter at a London symposium on July 11–12, 2016 was a coincidence, rather than at the direction of the FBI.[23][22] Clovis’s attorney said that Clovis and Halper had discussed China during their sole meeting on August 31 or September 1, 2016.[22]The New York Times reported that on September 15, 2016 Halper asked Papadopoulos if he knew of any Russian efforts to disrupt the election campaign; Papadopoulos twice denied he did, despite Joseph Mifsud telling him the previous April that Russians had embarrassing Hillary Clinton emails, and Papadopoulos bragging about it to Alexander Downer in May. After the emails were leaked, Downer informed the FBI of his conversation with Papadopoulos, triggering the opening of the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections.[24][22][25] Papadopoulos was paid $3,000 by Halper for a research paper on the oil fields of Turkey, Israel and Cyprus.[7]

On May 17, 2018, Trump tweeted[26] that the use of an informant by the “Obama FBI” was “bigger than Watergate“.[27]

In April 2019, The New York Times reported that the FBI had asked Halper to approach Page and Papadopoulos, although it was not clear if he had been asked to contact Clovis.[28] In May 2019, the Times reported that the FBI also sent an investigator using the name Azra Turk to meet with Papadopoulos, while posing as Halper’s assistant.[29]

Trump and his allies’ allegations

May 2018

On May 22, Trump made the following accusation on Twitter without providing any evidence:[6]

If the person placed very early into my campaign wasn’t a SPY put there by the previous Administration for political purposes, how come such a seemingly massive amount of money was paid for services rendered – many times higher than normal … Follow the money! The spy was there early in the campaign and yet never reported Collusion with Russia, because there was no Collusion. He was only there to spy for political reasons and to help Crooked Hillary win – just like they did to Bernie Sanders, who got duped!

The Associated Press reported that Trump privately said that he wanted “to brand” the informant as a “spy” as using a more nefarious term than “informant” would supposedly resonate more with the public.[31][32] Trump has not offered any evidence for Spygate when asked for it, instead saying: “All you have to do is look at the basics and you’ll see it.”[33]

In the May 22 tweets, Trump wrote that Halper, a longtime FBI informant, was paid a “massive amount of money” and concluded that he thus must be a spy implanted for “political purposes”. However, the $1 million in contracts for “social sciences and humanities” research, some of which Halper subcontracted to other researchers, were signed with the Defense department‘s Office of Net Assessment between 2012 to 2016, with 40% of the money awarded before Trump announced his candidacy in 2015.[34] It is unknown if the FBI paid Halper at all.[35][36] Halper worked for the Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations and continued as a State and Defense department advisor until 2001.[34][37] He had been considered for an ambassadorship in the Trump administration.[38]

In the May 23 tweets, Trump published a false quote attributed to former Director of National IntelligenceJames Clapper that “Trump should be happy that the FBI was SPYING on his campaign.” Instead, when asked “Was the FBI spying on Trump’s campaign?”, Clapper said, “No, they were not.” Clapper added that Trump should have been happy that the FBI was investigating “what the Russians were doing”, and “were the Russians infiltrating” his campaign or trying to influence the election.[39]

On May 26, 2018, Trump questioned “why didn’t the crooked highest levels of the FBI or ‘Justice’ contact me to tell me of the phony Russia problem?” NBC News reported in December 2017 that after Trump won the Republican nomination, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) “briefed and warned” him that foreign adversaries, including Russia, might attempt to spy on and infiltrate his campaign. Trump was told to alert the FBI of any suspicious activity.[40]

Asked on whether the promotion of the Spygate theory is meant to discredit the special counsel investigation, Trump’s attorney Rudy Giuliani said on May 27 that the investigators “are giving us the material to do it. Of course, we have to do it in defending the president … it is for public opinion” on whether to “impeach or not impeach” Trump.[42]

June 2018

On June 5, Trump made new accusations on Twitter, again without providing any evidence:[43]

Wow, Strzok-Page, the incompetent & corrupt FBI lovers, have texts referring to a counter-intelligence operation into the Trump Campaign dating way back to December, 2015. SPYGATE is in full force! Is the Mainstream Media interested yet? Big stuff!

However, the December 2015 texts do not make any reference to the Trump campaign or Russia.[44]

This particular conspiracy theory promoted by Trump was traced by media outlets to originate from a Twitter user called @Nick_Falco, who on June 4 posted about the words “oconus lures” in December 2015 texts between FBI employees Peter Strzok and Lisa Page. While “oconus” refers to “outside the continental United States”, Falco inferred that “lures” refer to spies.[43][45] However, according to the United States Department of Justice, “lures” refer to “subterfuge to entice a criminal defendant to leave a foreign country so that he or she can be arrested”.[46] Falco questioned if “the FBI wanted to run a baited Sting Op using foreign agents against Trump”, despite none of the texts mentioning the Trump campaign or Russia.[44] Also on June 4, Falco’s tweet spread to the r/conspiracy forum on Reddit, and also The Gateway Pundit, a far-right, pro-Trump website which has published multiple false conspiracy theories.[43][45] The Gateway Pundit wrote an article entitled: “Breaking: Senate releases unredacted texts showing FBI initiated MULTIPLE SPIES in Trump campaign in December 2015”.[47] However, the texts referenced by Falco were publicly released by a Senate committee months earlier in February 2018.[45][44] On June 5, Lou Dobbs of Fox Business said that “the FBI may have initiated a number of spies into the Trump campaign as early as December of 2015”. Dobbs’s interviewee on the show, Chris Farrell of the conservative group Judicial Watch, agreed that the existence of an “intelligence operation directed against then-candidate Trump” was “indisputable”. Trump’s June 5 tweet on Spygate came less than an hour after Dobbs’s interview, with Trump also tweeting praise of Dobbs for the “great interview”.[44][48]

After Trump made his June 5 tweet, Fox News described the news as “New Strzok-Page texts released”, with Fox News television host Laura Ingraham saying: “It certainly appears they were looking to put more lures into the campaign in 2015.” Republican Representative Ron DeSantis, a panelist on Ingraham’s show, agreed that it was “clear” that the FBI investigation into Trump started earlier than July 2016.[44][47]

Reactions and criticism

May 2018

Shortly after Trump’s allegation, several members of Congress received a classified briefing on the matter from the Justice Department. Trey Gowdy, the Republican chairman of the House Oversight Committee and a former federal prosecutor, stated after the briefing:[49][50]

I am even more convinced that the FBI did exactly what my fellow citizens would want them to do when they got the information they got, and that it has nothing to do with Donald Trump…President Trump himself in the Comey memos said if anyone connected with my campaign was working with Russia, I want you to investigate it, and it sounds to me like that is exactly what the FBI did. I think when the President finds out what happened, he is going to be not just fine, he is going to be glad that we have an FBI that took seriously what they heard…. The FBI is doing what he told them to do.

Republican Representative Tom Rooney, who is on the House Intelligence Committee, chided Trump for creating “this thing to tweet about knowing that it’s not true…. Maybe it’s just to create more chaos.”[52] Republican senator Jeff Flake has said that the “so-called Spygate” is a “diversion tactic, obviously”.[53] while Republican senator Marco Rubio said that “it appears that there was an investigation not of the campaign but of certain individuals who have a history that we should be suspicious of that predate the presidential campaign of 2015, 2016”.[54]

Representative Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, has said that Spygate is “lie-gate”, a “piece of propaganda the president wants to put out and repeat”. He accused President Trump of repeatedly spreading baseless lies by quoting that “people are saying …” or “we’ve been told …”.[53][55]Michael Hayden, a retired general, former Director of the National Security Agency and former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, said that Trump, through Spygate, was “simply trying to delegitimize the Mueller investigation, the FBI, the Department of Justice, and he’s willing to throw almost anything against the wall”.[54]

Journalist Shepard Smith has said that “Fox News can confirm that Spygate is not” true; “Fox News knows of no evidence to support the president’s claim. Lawmakers from both parties say using an informant to investigate is not spying. It’s part of the normal investigative process.”[56] Former judge and Fox News legal analyst Andrew Napolitano concurred:[57][58]

The allegations from Mayor Giuliani over the weekend, which would lead us to believe that the Trump people think the FBI had an undercover agent who finagled his way into Trump’s campaign and was there as a spy on the campaign seem to be baseless — there is no evidence for that whatsoever. But this other allegation with this professor, whose name we’re not supposed to mention, that is standard operating procedure in intelligence gathering and criminal investigations…I understand the president’s frustration that he was not informed of the fact that his campaign was being investigated, not because they think the campaign did anything wrong, but some people may have unwittingly…welcomed the Russian involvement in the campaign, and Donald Trump didn’t know about it…. [It] is such a stunningly unremarkable event, because law enforcement does this all the time.

Jon Meacham, a presidential historian, has said, in regards to Spygate: “The effect on the life of the nation of a president inventing conspiracy theories in order to distract attention from legitimate investigations or other things he dislikes is corrosive.”[1]

Aaron Blake, writing for The Washington Post, wrote that the “central problem” of the Spygate conspiracy theory is the “fact that these people who supposedly would do anything to stop Trump … didn’t”. In the period before the election, the FBI “didn’t use the information it had collected to actually prevent Trump from becoming president”, as it did not publicly reveal it was already investigating links between George Papadopoulos, Carter Page, Paul Manafort and Russia. Rather, the reports before the election were that the FBI saw no clear link between Russia and the Trump campaign, instead believing that Russia was trying to disrupt the election without purposely trying to elect Trump.[59]

Steven Poole, writing for The Guardian, wrote that the real scandal was Trump using the “-gate” suffix for the issue, as the Spygate allegations are about “purely imaginary things”.[60]

From May 31 to June 5, 2018, Quinnipiac University conducted a national poll of 1,223 voting Americans regarding the Spygate allegations. With the margin for error being 3.4%, a majority of 56% believed that the FBI’s usage of a confidential informant was “routine procedure”, while 33% agreed with Trump that the FBI was spying on the Trump campaign. The only group of voters with a majority believing Trump were Republicans at 66%.[61][62]

June 2018

The New York magazine addressed the June 2018 allegations by stating: “It’s not surprising or scandalous that FBI agents would be using espionage tradecraft. Gateway Pundit seems to have invented the crucial factual element of the conspiracy out of thin air” while “Trump is citing right-wing conspiracy theorists who operate at a full level further removed from reality than the right-wing conspiracy theorists he customarily cites.”[43]

Zack Beauchamp of Vox, which noted that “the FBI’s investigation into Trump didn’t open until July 2016”, wrote about the situation which was “entirely unfounded in the actual evidence” occurred because “Fox picks up on some random internet rumor, the president picks it up from Fox, and then Fox and other right-wing outlets leap to defend what the president tweeted, which only reinforces Trump’s sense that he’s right.” After reporting on both Trump’s May 2018 and June 2018, Beauchamp wrote that the “best way to analyze ‘Spygate’ is … a conspiracy theory … a ginned-up controversy Trump has capitalized on to justify his argument that the FBI is hopelessly biased against him”.[47]

Halper played a central role in a scandal in the 1980 election. But it was not until several years after Reagan’s victory over Carter that this scandal emerge. In connection with his position Halper’s name came up in the 1983/4 investigations into the Debategate affair, which was a spying scandal in which Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officials passed classified information about Carter administration’s foreign policy to Reagan campaign officials in order to ensure the Reagan campaign knew of any foreign policy decisions that Carter was considering (Iran hostage crisis). Reagan Administration officials cited by The New York Times described Halper as “the person in charge” of the operation.[7][8] Halper called the report “just absolutely untrue”.[9]

Business (1984–1990)

From 1984 to 1990 Halper was chairman and majority shareholder of the Palmer National Bank of Washington, D.C., the National Bank of Northern Virginia and the George Washington National Bank.[6] Palmer National Bank was used to transfer money to Swiss Bank Accounts controlled by White House aid Oliver North.[11]

According to Peter Dale Scott‘s book The Iran-Contra Connection: Secret Teams and Covert Operations in Reagan Era on the Iran-Contra scandal, Ray Cline’s son-in-law Roger Fontaine “made at least two visits to Guatemala in 1980… (with General Sumner) drafting the May 1980 Santa Fe Statement, which said that World War III was already underway in Central America against the Soviets and that Nicauragua was the enemy. And some Reagan aides felt that Halper “was receiving information from the CIA.”[12]

The Palmer National Bank, where Halper worked, was described as “the DC hub by which Lt. Col. Oliver North sent arms and money to the anti-Sandinista guerrilla Contras in Nicaragua. One of Palmer’s founders, Stefan Halper, had no previous banking experience but was George H.W. Bush’s foreign policy director during Bush’s unsuccessful 1980 presidential campaign.” [13]

Academic and media (1986–2000)

From 1986 to 2000 Halper wrote a national security and foreign policy-focused weekly newspaper column, syndicated to 30 newspapers.[6]

Halper has worked as a senior foreign policy advisor to various think-tanks and research institutions, including the Center for Strategic and International Studies, The Center for the National Interest, where he is a Distinguished Fellow, and The Institute of World Politicswhere he is a Research Professor. He has served on the Advisory Board of Directors of the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies and contributed to various magazines, journals, newspapers and media outlets. These include: The National Interest, The Washington Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, The American Spectator, the BBC, CNN, SKY NEWS, ABC, CBS, NBC, C-Span, and a range of radio outlets.

In a 2007 book, The Silence of the Rational Center, Halper analyzed “institutional failures” in United States policy-making:

“Three times since World War II, Big Ideas have seized the political discourse and driven policy experts to the sidelines: during the Red Scare of the early Cold War; during the entry to the Vietnam War, with its talk off democracy and dominos; and at the onset of the Iraq War. Each time, framing concepts rooted in Big Ideas turned complex foreign policy challenges into undifferentiated, apocalyptic threats to the nation’s very existence. Professionals and area experts were excluded from the debate if they diverged from the patriotic consensus, and the mainstream institutions and publications that could have opposed the rush to simplification were either silent or instead provided an echo chamber for the dominant narrative.”[15]

Russian Berlin-based journalist Leonid Bershidsky wrote in May 2018, that “the Trump-Russia scandal born of this operation [FBI’s investigation of the Trump campaign] could be added to The Silence of the Rational Center as a fourth institutional failure.”[15]

United States government research (2012–2016)

From 2012 to 2016 Halper received $1 million in contracts for “social sciences and humanities” research from the Defense department‘s Office of Net Assessment, some of which Halper subcontracted to other researchers. Forty percent of the money had been awarded before Trump announced his candidacy in 2015.[16]

Page said that he “had extensive discussions” with Halper on “a bunch of different foreign-policy-related topics,” ending in September 2017.[17] A former federal law enforcement official told The New York Times that their initial encounter at a London symposium on July 11–12, 2016 was a coincidence, rather than at the direction of the FBI.[18][17] Clovis’s attorney said that Clovis and Halper had discussed China during their sole meeting on August 31 or September 1, 2016.[17] On September 2, 2016 Halper contacted Papadopoulos, inviting him to London and to write a paper on Mediterranean old fields, which he did.[17] On September 15, 2016 Halper asked Papadopoulos if he knew of any Russian efforts to disrupt the election campaign; Papadopoulos twice denied he did, despite Joseph Mifsudtelling him the previous April that Russians had embarrassing Hillary Clinton emails, and Papadopoulos bragging about it to Alexander Downer in May. The New York Times reported in April 2019 that the FBI had asked Halper to approach Page and Papadopoulos, although it was not clear if he had been asked to contact Clovis.[19] During the late summer of 2016 the FBI authorized a federal investigator who called herself Azra Turk to pose as Halper’s research assistant, to gather information on Papadopoulos, and oversee the operation.[20]

Trump’s Spygate allegations are widely debunked, but gained renewed interest in April 2019 after attorney general William Barr testified to Congress that “spying did occur” on the Trump campaign, although his characterization of “spying” was ambiguous and he declined to be specific. He stated he was assembling a team to examine the matter, although the Justice Department inspector general had been looking into it and related matters for some time and was expected to release his report within weeks.[21]

Prior to his 2016 activities, Halper had a February 2014 encounter at a London intelligence conference with Michael Flynn, then the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and later a Trump supporter and first national security advisor. Harper became so alarmed by Flynn’s close association with a Russian woman that a Halper associate expressed concerns to American authorities that Flynn may have been compromised by Russian intelligence. Flynn was forced out of the DIA six months later, although public accounts at the time cited other reasons for his removal, including his management style and views on Islam.[22]

Consideration for Trump administration role

Personal life

Halper’s former wife, Sibyl Cline, is the daughter of the former CIA deputy director for intelligence, Ray S. Cline.[8]

Books

He is the co-author of the bestselling book, America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order, published by the Cambridge University Press in 2004, and also co-author of The Silence of the Rational Centre: Why American Foreign Policy is Failing (2007). In April 2010, his book The Beijing Consensus: Legitimizing Authoritarianism in Our Time, was published by Basic Books. Also a bestseller, it has been published in Japan, Taiwan, China, South Korea, and France.

Awards

Halper is a recipient of the State Department’s Superior Honor Award, the Justice Department’s Director’s Award, and the Defense Department’s Superior Honor Award.

Joseph Mifsud (born 1960)[1] is a Maltese academic, with reportedly high level connections to the Russian government.[2] In 2016, he became involved with George Papadopoulos, an advisor to the Donald Trump presidential campaign, and was later accused of being a link between that campaign and Russia. In 2018, he was described as missing, and an Italian court listed his location as “residence unknown”.[3] According to media reports he is in Rome as of April 2019.[4] In an April 2019 interview Rudy Giuliani revealed that Mifsud was a “…Maltese counterintelligence guy“[5]

Education

Mifsud holds a bachelor’s degree in education from the University of Malta (1982) and a master’s degree in education from the University of Padua (1989).[1] He was awarded a PhD in 1995 from Queen’s University Belfast; his thesis was titled “Managing educational reform: a comparative approach from Malta (and Northern Ireland); a headteachers’ perspective”.[6]

Career

From 2006 to 2008, Mifsud served as the chef de cabinet of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Malta.[1] He later became a principal in the London Centre of International Law Practice. In 2008, he was named President of the Euro-Mediterranean University of Slovenia(EMUNI).[1][7] He was a professorial teaching fellow at the University of Stirling in Scotland,[8] as well as director of the London Academy of Diplomacy, where he served as director from 2012 until it closed in 2016. The academy was partnered with the University of Stirling.[9][10][11] He has also served as president of the University Consortium of the Province of Agrigento in Sicily; in September 2018, an Italian court ordered him to repay the Consortium 49,000 euros ($56,700) in overpayments.[3]

In a 2017 interview, he claimed to be a member of the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR),[12] although the ECFR website in 2018 did not list him as a member.[13] He regularly attended meetings of the Valdai Discussion Club, an annual conference held in Sochi, Russia, backed by the Kremlin and attended by Vladimir Putin.[14] According to a BBC report, Mifsud was in Moscow in April 2016 to speak on a panel run by the Valdai Club alongside Dr. Stephan Roh, a German multimillionaire lawyer and investor described as a “wheeler-dealer” by the BBC Newsnight program.[15] Roh, Mifsud’s former employer,[16] could not be reached for comment by the BBC and has since attempted to erase links between the two men on his company website. Another speaker at the Valdai Club was Ivan Timofeev, who works for a think tank close to the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, whom Mifsud subsequently introduced to Papadopoulos via email.[15] Mifsud reportedly claimed to his former girlfriend that he was friends with Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov.[17]Mifsud himself denied having any contact with the Russian government, saying “I am an academic, I do not even speak Russian.”[8] The Mueller Report, released in 2019, said that Mifsud “maintained various Russian contacts while living in London”, including an unnamed person (name redacted), who was a former staff member of the Internet Research Agency, the Russian troll farm based in Saint Petersburg.[18]

Connection to George Papadopoulos

In March 2016, shortly after Papadopoulos was named as a foreign policy advisor to the Trump campaign, Mifsud met Papadopoulos in Rome. They later met again in London, where Mifsud allegedly introduced Papadopoulos to a Russian woman that he falsely claimed was Putin’s niece; Mifsud has denied the report.[8][14] At a meeting in April, Mifsud told Papadopoulos that he had learned the Russians were in possession of thousands of emails that were damaging to Hillary Clinton. Papadopoulos allegedly repeated the information to the Australian High Commissioner in London, Alexander Downer, who later reported to American authorities that Papadopoulos had apparently known about Russia’s theft of emails from Democratic sources before it was publicly reported. Papadopoulos has since publicly denied any recollection of this topic with Downer. The FBI then launched an investigation into possible connections between Russia and the Trump campaign.[19]

Volume 1 of the Mueller Report[20] states that Mifsud travelled to Moscow in April 2016, and upon his return told Papadopoulos that the Russian government had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton.[18] It also mentions that Papadopoulos “suggested to a representative of a foreign government that the Trump Campaign had received indications from the Russian government that it could assist the Campaign through the anonymous release of information damaging to candidate Clinton”. This would appear to corroborate the contact with Downer.

According to Mifsud, he was interviewed by the FBI in February 2017 while visiting the United States to speak at a conference.[21][22] The FBI has not confirmed that they interviewed him, but he is listed as a featured speaker at the February 2017 national meeting of Global Ties, an event sponsored by the U.S. Department of State.[23] Mifsud left the United States on 11 February 2017. Prosecutors with the investigation into Russian interference in the election suggested, in a 17 August 2018 sentencing memorandum for Papadopoulos, that they might have wanted to challenge, detain, or arrest Mifsud if Papadopoulos had told the truth about their interactions.[24]

Connection to Stephan Roh

Stephan Roh, a Russian-speaking[25] German lawyer and multimillionaire with close ties to Russia, has worked alongside Mifsud for years. Papadopoulos’s wife, who briefly worked for Mifsud, has described Roh as Mifsud’s lawyer, best friend, and funder. Roh owns multiple businesses, many headquartered in Moscow or Cyprus; he also co-owns Link University, where Mifsud taught. Roh was detained and questioned by investigators on Robert Mueller’s Special Counsel team in October 2017.[26]

Missing report

According to a filing in a U.S. federal court in the case Democratic National Committee v. Russian Federation in September 2018, Mifsud “is missing and may be deceased”. Mifsud’s whereabouts were unknown and he could not be served with the complaint.[27] He spoke to his girlfriend on 31 October 2017. The next day an Italian newspaper revealed that the “professor” referred to in news reports about Papadopoulos was Mifsud, and she has not heard from him since then.[28] According to CNN, he has “gone to ground” and was last seen on 6 November 2017 at Link University, a private university in Rome where he was teaching at the time.[21] In September 2018, an Italian court described his location as “residence unknown”.[3]

In September 2018, a few days after the DNC filing, his associate Stephan Roh told The Daily Caller that he had gotten an indirect message from “really good sources” indicating that Mifsud is alive and living under a new identity.[29]

Story 3: FBI or CIA Sent Informant To Spy on Trump Campaign Foreign Policy Adviser George Papadopoulos — Coming Attractions of The Department of Justice Inspector General Report in Early June –Videos

An informant working for U.S. intelligence posed as a Cambridge University research assistant in September 2016 to try to probe George Papadopoulos, then a Trump foreign policy adviser, on the campaign&apos;s possible ties to Russia, according to a new report. And, Papadopoulos told Fox News on Thursday, the informant tried to “seduce” him as part of the “bizarre” episode.

The Thursday report in The New York Times cited individuals familiar with the Justice Department&apos;s ongoing Inspector General (IG) review of the intelligence community&apos;s actions in the run-up to Donald Trump&apos;s election as president. Attorney General William Barr received harsh partsian blowback for suggesting that “spying did occur” during the presidential race, but doubled down at a testy Senate hearing on Wednesday.

The Times reported that the FBI sent a woman using the alias Azra Turk to meet Papadopoulos at a London bar, where she asked, conspicuously and directly, whether the Trump team was working with Russia. Papadopoulos told Fox News on Thursday that he “immediately thought she was an agent, but a Turkish agent, or working with the CIA,” and “that&apos;s why I never accepted her overtures and met her again after London. … London became a very bizarre hangout spot for me that year.”

The FBI did not reply to Fox News&apos; request for comment. BOMBSHELL CLAIM: FBI ASKED TRUMP AIDE TO WEAR A WIRE Turk, Papadopoulos added, was trying to “seduce” him in an effort to “make me slip up and say something that they knew I had no info on.” George Papadopoulos (left) pleaded guilty in October to lying to the FBI about his conversations with Maltese professor Joseph Mifsud (right). (Twitter/Youtube) Papadopoulos told Fox News that he saw Turk three times in London: once over drinks, another over dinner, and then once with Stefan Halper, the Cambridge professor who has been a longtime FBI informant. The Times noted that Turk had apparently been sent to oversee Halper.

In House testimony. Papadopoulos previously said Turk “didn&apos;t strike me as a Cambridge associate at all” and noted that “her English was very bad.” According to Papadopoulos, “the professors liked to introduce me to young beautiful women.”

“As someone who has worked a lot in the Middle East and Southern Europe on policy issues and energy issues, as I was heavily involved in from 2011-2017, I would notice odd behavior of people I later learned were agents,”

Papadopoulos continued. When asked when he learned Turk was an agent, Papadopoulos replied: “I always had suspicions but the moment Halper was outed a year ago, I knew she was, too.” The informant operation against Papadopoulos provided no useful information to U.S. intelligence, the Times reported. Special Counsel Robert Mueller&apos;s report indicated that operation began after Papadopoulos told an Australian official of “indications from the Russian government that it could assist the campaign through the anonymous

F.B.I. Sent Investigator Posing as Assistant to Meet With Trump Aide in 2016

WASHINGTON — The conversation at a London bar in September 2016 took a strange turn when the woman sitting across from George Papadopoulos, a Trump campaign adviser, asked a direct question: Was the Trump campaign working with Russia?

The woman had set up the meeting to discuss foreign policy issues. But she was actually a government investigator posing as a research assistant, according to people familiar with the operation. The F.B.I. sent her to London as part of the counterintelligence inquiry opened that summer to better understand the Trump campaign’s links to Russia.

The American government’s affiliation with the woman, who said her name was Azra Turk, is one previously unreported detail of an operation that has become a political flash point in the face of accusations by President Trump and his allies that American law enforcement and intelligence officials spied on his campaign to undermine his electoral chances. Last year, he called it “Spygate.”

The decision to use Ms. Turk in the operation aimed at a presidential campaign official shows the level of alarm inside the F.B.I. during a frantic period when the bureau was trying to determine the scope of Russia’s attempts to disrupt the 2016 election, but could also give ammunition to Mr. Trump and his allies for their spying claims.

Ms. Turk went to London to help oversee the politically sensitive operation, working alongside a longtime informant, the Cambridge professor Stefan A. Halper. The move was a sign that the bureau wanted in place a trained investigator for a layer of oversight, as well as someone who could gather information for or serve as a credible witness in any potential prosecution that emerged from the case.

A spokesman for the F.B.I. declined to comment, as did a lawyer for Mr. Halper, Robert D. Luskin. Last year, Bill Priestap, then the bureau’s top counterintelligence agent who was deeply involved in the Russia inquiry, told Congress during a closed-door hearing that there was no F.B.I. conspiracy against Mr. Trump or his campaign.

The London operation yielded no fruitful information, but F.B.I. officials have called the bureau’s activities in the months before the election both legal and carefully considered under extraordinary circumstances. They are now under scrutiny as part of an investigation by Michael E. Horowitz, the Justice Department inspector general. He could make the results public in May or June, Attorney General William P. Barr has said. Some of the findings are likely to be classified.

It is unclear whether Mr. Horowitz will find fault with the F.B.I.’s decision to have Ms. Turk, whose real name is not publicly known, meet with Mr. Papadopoulos. Mr. Horowitz has focused among other things on the activities of Mr. Halper, who accompanied Ms. Turk in one of her meetings with Mr. Papadopoulos and also met with him and other campaign aides separately. The bureau might also have seen Ms. Turk’s role as essential for protecting Mr. Halper’s identity as an informant if prosecutors ever needed court testimony about their activities.

Mr. Barr reignited the controversy last month when he told Congress, “I think spying on a political campaign is a big deal.” He backed off the charged declaration later in the same hearing, saying: “I think spying did occur. The question is whether it was adequately predicated. And I’m not suggesting that it wasn’t adequately predicated. But I need to explore that.”

Mr. Barr again defended his use of the term “spying” at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday, saying he wanted to know more about the F.B.I.’s investigative efforts during 2016 and explained that the early inquiry likely went beyond the use of an informant and a court-authorized wiretap of a former Trump campaign adviser, Carter Page, who had interacted with a Russian intelligence officer.

“Many people seem to assume that the only intelligence collection that occurred was a single confidential informant” and the warrant to surveil Mr. Page, Mr. Barr said. “I would like to find out whether that is in fact true. It strikes me as a fairly anemic effort if that was the counterintelligence effort designed to stop the threat as it’s being represented.”

Possible FBI, Trump campaign “spying” under review: Barr

This account was described in interviews with people familiar with the F.B.I. activities of Mr. Halper, Ms. Turk and the inspector general’s investigation. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the subjects of a continuing inquiry.

As part of Mr. Horowitz’s investigation, his office has examined Mr. Halper’s past work as an F.B.I. informant and asked witnesses about whether agents had adequate control of Mr. Halper’s activities, people familiar with the inquiry have said.

While in London in 2016, Ms. Turk exchanged emails with Mr. Papadopoulos, saying meeting him had been the “highlight of my trip,” according to messages provided by Mr. Papadopoulos.

“I am excited about what the future holds for us :),” she wrote.

Weeks before Mr. Papadopoulos met with Ms. Turk and Mr. Halper, the F.B.I. had opened its investigation into the Russia effort — based largely on information that Mr. Papadopoulos had relayed to an Australian diplomat about a Russian offer to help the Trump campaign by releasing thousands of hacked Democratic emails.

The F.B.I. received the information from the Australian government on July 26, 2016, the special counsel’s report said, and the bureau code-named its investigation Crossfire Hurricane.

Investigators scrambled to determine whether Mr. Papadopoulos had any Russian contacts while deciding to scrutinize three additional Trump campaign aides who had concerning ties to Russia: Paul Manafort, its chairman; Michael T. Flynn, who went on to be the president’s first national security adviser; and Mr. Page.

Secrecy was paramount for the F.B.I. officials because of the sensitivities of investigating campaign advisers during a presidential race. Had the investigation into Trump advisers’ contacts with Russia become public, it could have devastated the Trump campaign. And top bureau officials were enduring fresh attacks over their handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation.

One of the agents involved in the Russia inquiry, a seasoned counterintelligence investigator out of New York, turned to Mr. Halper, whom he viewed as a reliable and trusted informant. They had a longstanding relationship; the agent had even spoken at an intelligence seminar that Mr. Halper taught at the University of Cambridge, discussing his work investigating a Russian espionage ring known as the illegals.

Mr. Halper had the right résumé for the task. He was a foreign policy expert who had worked for the Pentagon. He had been gathering information for the F.B.I. for about two decades and had good contacts in Chinese and Russian government circles that he could use to arrange meetings with high-ranking officials, according to a person briefed on Mr. Halper’s relationship with the F.B.I.

The F.B.I. instructed Mr. Halper to set up a meeting in London with Mr. Papadopoulos but gave him few details about the broader investigation, a person familiar with the episode said.

His job was to figure out the extent of any contacts between Trump campaign advisers and Russia. Mr. Halper used his position as a respected academic to introduce himself to both Mr. Papadopoulos and Mr. Page, whom he also met with several times. He arranged a meeting with Mr. Papadopoulos in London to discuss a Mediterranean natural gas project, offering $3,000 for his time and a policy paper.

The F.B.I. also decided to send Ms. Turk to take part in the operation, people familiar with it said, and to pose as Mr. Halper’s assistant. For the F.B.I., placing such a sensitive undertaking in the hands of a trusted government investigator was essential.

British intelligence officials were also notified about the operation, the people familiar with the operation said, but it was unclear whether they provided assistance. A spokeswoman for the British government declined to comment.

Mr. Trump has repeatedly claimed that British intelligence spied on his campaign, an accusation the British government has vigorously denied. Last month, the president quoted on Twitter an accusation that the British had spied on his campaign and added: “WOW! It is now just a question of time before the truth comes out, and when it does, it will be a beauty!”

When Mr. Papadopoulos arrived in London on Sept. 15, he received a text message from Ms. Turk. She invited him for drinks.

In his book, “Deep State Target,” Mr. Papadopoulos described her as attractive and said she almost immediately began questioning him about whether the Trump campaign was working with Russia, he wrote.

Mr. Papadopoulos was baffled. “There is no way this is a Cambridge professor’s research assistant,” he recalled thinking, according to his book. In recent weeks, he has said in tweets that he believes Ms. Turk may have been working for Turkish intelligence but provided no evidence.

The day after meeting Ms. Turk, Mr. Papadopoulos met briefly with Mr. Halper at a private London club, and Ms. Turk joined them. The two men agreed to meet again, arranging a drink at the Sofitel hotel in London’s posh West End.

During that conversation, Mr. Halper immediately asked about hacked emails and whether Russia was helping the campaign, according to Mr. Papadopoulos’s book. Angry over the accusatory questions, Mr. Papadopoulos ended the meeting.

The F.B.I. failed to glean any information of value from the encounters, and Ms. Turk returned to the United States.

Mr. Halper continued to work with the F.B.I. and later met with Mr. Page repeatedly in the Washington area. The two had coincidentally run into each other in July as well at Cambridge, according to people familiar with the episode.

At the urging of Mr. Page, he met another campaign aide, Sam Clovis, Mr. Trump’s campaign co-chairman, to discuss foreign policy. While aware of the contact with Mr. Clovis, the F.B.I. did not instruct Mr. Halper to ask him questions related to the Russia investigation, according to a person briefed on the matter.

Mr. Clovis recounted his coffee with Mr. Halper in Washington with an Iowa radio station in May 2018. “There was no indication or no inclination that this was anything other than just wanting to offer up his help to the campaign if I needed it,” he said.

Mr. Halper’s connections to the Trump administration strengthened from there. He was invited as part of a group of China experts to meet with White House advisers in 2017. Mr. Halper informed the F.B.I. of the invitation but was not provided with any guidance, people familiar with the episode said.

The group met briefly with Peter Navarro, the president’s top trade representative, who had interviewed Mr. Halper years earlier at Mr. Halper’s home in Virginia for a documentary. According to Axios, the administration also considered Mr. Halper for an ambassadorship.

In an interview with Fox Radio, Mr. Navarro said he viewed Mr. Halper’s role as an F.B.I. informant as a betrayal, saying he felt “duped.”